I would like to hear how folks feel about some of the impacts that advancements in information technology have had on the dissemination of radical thought and practice in the last two decades as well as how people feel about its future implementation. I realize that I ask a broad question, but my interest lies primarily in how people feel the subject relates to them personally.

EDIT':
Changed the question in hopes that people simply did not feel inspired to read the auxiliary information, which remains unmodified, and will suddenly find interest in answering a "serious" question..
Original question:
So srsly liek why doesnt @101 have an iPhone app ??

"The intellectual integration of the working people by uniting material and intellectual, industrial and agricultural work by means of a variety of occupations, so that all the human faculties may be activated (intensive cultivation of the human being).” - Saverio Merlino

If we were to modernize this text - Linux, FreeBSD, and any opensource project could be classified as a process in intellectual integration. Ex. Android`s kernel is based on linux.

The intellectual integration is what I really put most emphasis on for a better future. When one`s neighbors have similar access to education, then intelligence may be cultivated more by choice than rather by obligation.

2 Answers

+2 votes

so, since this is an anarchist 101 site...

many anarchists have the perspective that technology continues and emphasizes people's alienation from the world and each other.

some of those anarchists define technology quite broadly and philosophically, and consider language and symbolic thought to be technological (or technologies), and so part of the distancing of people from ourselves and the world. (this perspective is part of a search for how the current system came to exist, and relies heavily on anthropology.)

other anarchists believe that technology has just been badly created and imagined, as a part of the oppressive system that we live in--and believe that a technology created in an egalitarian, liberatory system would not have the alienating factor(s) that we see around us today.

So, as stated in the auxiliary info, I'd love to know how you perceive the actual effects that IT has had on the spread and development of radical thought over the last few decades. What has it done on a large scale? How has it affected you and those you know personally? How has the accessibility of or general awareness of various schools of thought changed because of it?

yea i didn't answer the way you seem to want because i'm not sure what i think about that kind of posing of a question on a site like this.
it seems like this is straying over a (vague and intangible) line into blog territory, which @101 is not. thoughts?

Do you suppose that everyone views anarchism in the same manner? This site alone adequately evidences the differences in perspective that people bear on the subject. If the idea of anarchism somehow existed in a pure, distilled form, then why allow for multiple answers? Maybe we could establish one person as an Authority on the subject, and everyone could just direct their questions to them.
Your response confuses me a great deal. You manage a space for individuals to respond to questions about the same subject, and the space contains little infrastructure to discourage a variety of responses. If our individual perspectives will invariably affect our writings, I see no reason to exclude our personal contexts from the thoughts we share. For instance, I regularly find myself thinking about autonomous education models. If I wrote and circulated a paper detailing the positive impacts of Unitierra in Oaxacan communities and, in it, asserted that we should adopt the exact same model for my neighborhood in Oakland, I would receive endless amounts of criticism and little support. If I instead point out that Unitierra helps develop individuals towards meeting identified long-term needs within their communities, I can begin a discourse to identify the needs that seem apparent to those in my own community. Having reevaluated our needs together, we can then determine what infrastructure, educational and otherwise, we must develop in order to meet those needs ourselves. We do not necessarily need to provide graphic information, as I have shared my location, about our identities in order to make our points, but I think that we should explain why we personally support the assertions we make.

In short, I believe that, by taking context into account, we would not so enable ourselves towards making generalizations. Having found the extent to which we can mutually relate to an idea, we can enter into objective discourse without making assumptions about what others mean or about what they will infer from our statements.
(Edited to complete a fragment.)

i do not disagree with anything you said after your first accusation (which is refuted by this site itself - as you note - and by most of my own posts), so apparently we are disagreeing on semantics.
perhaps you don't associate blogging with writings that are somewhat off the cuff and more personal. perhaps the blogs you read are all theoretical or journalistic.

I am glad that I can have these conversations, which are ones I am not having IRL. I love cruising anarchist news sites, debating shit on them, and I think sites like theanarchistlibrary.org, zinelibrary.net and so on are really helpful in a lot of ways for those of us in the anarchist scene(s).

I think that information technology, as it has come to be defined in the past 20 years, is both the primary means of spreading anarchic ideas, and the most effective means of marginalizing anarchists.

The easiest way to illustrate this is my answer to this question. I am answering, via the internet, a person I will likely never meet. I could be talking about information technology with the other anarchists I know who live in my town, face to face, but I'm not. Some of that is due to differences in lifestyle (I just don't run in to other anarchists as much as I'd like), some of it do to sectarianism (I don't really enjoy arguing with leftists about semantics and/or serious differences before we can actually start talking), and some of it is due to me being shy. But a lot of it has to do with the fact that I can sit here at my computer writing a response to someone I don't know (even if I do know you) and post it on teh internet. I can log back on tomorrow and see if people have responded, and that gives me a sense of connection.

At least when we were primarily writing zines we had to send it to a physical address. Now we just position an icon over a "button" and click. Message sent.

I appreciate the internet even while it is killing me. I hope I get to see its' non-existence.